I first joined Ekco as a Development engineer in October 1951. At that time most of Development and Engineering section was housed in the two story building at the south west corner of the Ekco site but television development overflowed into the top end of the old lamp factory (the older low building adjacent to the sports field).
Eric Cole was much in evidence, of course; he had recently bought a new Rolls Royce (or it might have been a Bentley) which was always parked at the entrance of the main building and visible to all. Tony Martin was chief engineer and under him were Harold Hunt who looked after domestic radio and Norman Atkinson who was in charge of television development. Roy Burtenshaw ran the drawing office; there must have been about 30 draughtsmen (using pencils!) and five or six women tracers.
First, I worked with Norman Jerrum for Eric "Sandy" Saunders, who was one of Hunts minions. Sandy had worked at Aston Clinton until it closed then transferred to Southend. Norman had started life at Ekco in the lamp factory but that facility had closed earlier that year (sold to Thorn – lamp division I believe) and he had transferred to D&E. Norman and I designed transformers of all shapes and sizes - mostly mains but also loudspeaker and microphone. It was quite surprising just how many different designs were required; every new box needed a made-to-measure transformer of some sort. The D&E winding shop was run a Mr.Sid Parr.
Sandy was a bit of an odd job man; also in his lab were Charlie Winterburn? and Mr Morgan. Charlie was an old bloke who assembled prototypes; I remember particularly him assembling the Princess portable radio which was tiny (for those days); I'm not sure whether it ever went into production - probably too difficult to assemble. Mr. Morgan was also nearing retirement; his job was to maintain and repair test equipment. His method was (1). Change all valves, (2). change all electrolytics. If that didn't work he was stumped! After a short time he was moved and took up residence in the Standards Room where he added looking after an AVO Universal Valve Tester and a huge Weatstone bridge to his duties. One day I went down to see him and to measure something and he had gone, never to be seen again; nobody seemed to know what had happened to him.
Hunt's office was next door to Sandy's lab and Hunt, when he wanted something done, opened the door of his office and bawled "Sandy" into the corridor. Sandy immediately dropped everything, scrambled to his feet and hobbled out as fast as he could (he had a game leg - a childhood accident). On one such occasion he came back with a bloke who had a box full of day-old chicks under his arm and a prototype of a "day-old-chick-sexer". This consisted of a slim probe about 2 inches long, a battery and light and a lens. The procedure was to insert the probe into the chick and peer through the lens. If the unfortunate chick was male it had its neck broken immediately and it landed in the bin; we ended the day with a bin full of dead chicks. The proposal was that we should productionise this thing; I am pleased to say we declined.
Mr. Seymour was a sort of administrative dogs body under Tony Martin. He had a sexy young secretary named Pam Cooksley (later married Ted O'Flynn) who turned young men's legs to jelly.
Mr Spencer was head of quality control and environmental testing. He had very bad eyesight and could only read things if they were about 3 inches from his nose. Under him was Miss Durrant, a middle aged lady, and Miss Binstead. "Binney" was a personable girl in her twenties and a chemist; she ran an archetypal chemistry lab. with rows of glass-stoppered bottles, racks of test tubes and a stinks cupboard. This was down in the old lamp factory. I never discovered what she did with it all; whatever it was she was popular with a lot of the male staff.
There was also M. V. Calender - "Maxie" . He was a relation of the famous Calender of Cambridge and was the "boffin" of the place. Most of his work related to the fundamentals of television circuit design and one of his main functions was with E.M.F. Propagation at UHF frequencies. Les Pugh worked under him. These two had been two of the top WDU Engineers (BOFFINS) during the war at Malmesbury.
There was a George Barsslinman who worked on television time bases for Norman Atkinson. I remember he once made a time base whose valve ran so hot that it melted the glass envelope which then collapsed on to the electrode structure; it continued to work quite happily in that condition. I think this (Fly back) power supply was eventually patented under EKCO & George's name and involved an out of court settlement with Pye of Cambridge when they pinched the design and used in one of their TV's. Mazda eventually produced a valve to handle the power.
Norman Woodall designed very good domestic radios under Barnard (I think). He was a bit of a gossip and when he got a bit bored he went round the labs looking for "chairs to mend" and wasting other's time. He left after a short time and became a solicitor. Also with Barnard was an Indian on secondment from Ekco India; he was to take designs back to India for production there. Norman's father was the store man in Development stores; he stocked thousands of items - except the one you particularly wanted! All your requirements had to be written out on a requisition and this had to be left in a box; if he had what you wanted a lad brought it up to you, if not, he ordered the item and a lad brought it up when it came in. Must have been very inefficient.
George Hart designed, specified and tested loud speakers which were then made by somebody else - they may have been made at Ekco at some time. George left after a short time and joined one of the big loud speaker companies - at obvious move!
George Hart was also a first class radio design engineer and among other projects had been responsible for the R1154 T1155 TX design for the M.A.P. just before WW2 from the original design by Marconi, which eventually went into production at the EKCO Alyesbury Shadow Factory. EKCO's main effort on this RX was the reduction of weight and size as well as improving the sensitivity.
Fred Ellis was the mechanical man and Jack Laggett ran the model shop. I suppose Arthur Knipe must have been there somewhere but I can't remember him. (A R Knipe was a senior mechanical engineer at WDU Malmesbury during WW2).
Ted O'Flynn ran a communications lab and was responsible for the design of the airport DF system for small airports; there was one installed at Southend Airport for many years.
After designing transformers for a few months I went to help with the production testing of the CE39 and left transformers to Sandy and Norman. The CE39 was a mobile transmitter/receiver operating at about 85Mcs/s (not hertz in those days!) with an output power of about 5 watts, frequency modulated. It was a development from a smaller unit which had been designed for the Southend Waterworks Company and which could be fitted on the back of a motor bike. (The Waterworks had a base station in the Hadleigh water tower which we maintained occasionally). Peter Harvey had been responsible for the design of both units.and a batch of 100 CE39s had been sold to the Metropolitan Police for installation in their cars - I believe it was the police's first attempt at communicating with their cars. Dick Greener and I did the testing and Ken Clodd (son of the then Sales Director) was a sort of supervisor and liaised with production which was down in the old lamp factory. It took about half a day to test and set up each unit - the difficult bit was persuading the transmitter to produce the required power stably.
The system was very successful; unfortunately Pye had noticed and wanted to get in on the act so started pushing the merits of their AM system in high places. Note: Pye got into the Taxi radio act and from there developed the Police AM TX/RX system, which proved to be very successful.
When we had completed the run of CE39s Ken went to "Special Products" as a supervisor and Dick and I went into Peter Harvey's lab. Peter had been in the RAF, had a large moustache and always sucked a disgusting pipe - Dick and I went into the receiver section. Harry Spinks and a Pole, Tony Butchinski (don't know how to spell it!) and, I think, Eric Fielder were on the transmitter side. (Funnily enough I can't really remember exactly what Eric did at that time; he was always around). Tony was a tall thin fellow always in an immaculate white lab coat (everybody was issued with a white lab coat and these were collected every now and again and laundered; not everybody wore them) who had been in the Polish Cavalry at the beginning of the war and had somehow escaped to this country. He was a good engineer and unfortunately left after a short while.(I suspect he didn't get on with Harry). Bob Matthews joined Dick and I in the receiver section. Bob was twin brother of Stan who worked for Atkinson in television.
Somewhere about this time Jim Streeter arrived at Ekco. He worked on the "Victor" (I think that was what it was called) film projector. The idea was to put a magnetic stripe down the edge of 16mm cine film and a magnetic head and suitable amplifiers were attached to the projector so as to record and playback sound for amateur movies. The heads were made down in Special Products Production. On one occasion Jim bought a new lens for the projector; when he looked at it he noticed that there was a bluish film on the surface of the lens. This worried him so he polished it off with his handkerchief! I think the system worked OK but it hardly got off the ground before it was cancelled.
In the floods of 1953 the Ekco Canvey factory was flooded to a depth of about a foot and telephone lines cut. So we took a CE39 and a suitable aerial over to Canvey and set it up so that they could communicate with head office at Southend. We took Albert along with us and he fixed an aerial on the roof of the factory. Albert was the "rigger". He was an ex-naval man and if you wanted anything put up or taken down or moved you called for Albert; he came along with a piece of rope...and the job was done! The Canvey factory made resistors and potentiometers of various sorts.
One of the first projects I was involved with in Peter Harvey's lab was to design and build a television relay station for use in Italy. This comprised a receiver, a monitor and a transmitter in a 6ft rack. It was for use in small villages in the mountains in Italy which couldn't receive signals from the main transmitter. We built this thing and it worked well and was duly dispatched to Italy - and was never heard of again! It was said that the ship it was on had sunk in the Mediterranean but we all suspected there was more to it than that. It was a black-and-white system, of course, but about this time colour television was being talked about so Norman Atkinson acquired, at vast expense, a colour television signal generator; this comprised three or four 6ft racks and was set up in a room of its own. Heaven knows why it was so big - and it didn't even have a sound channel. This setup was an identical one to that supplied to the BBC and I think EKCO was the only TV manufacturing company who had one. Most other companies relied on the BBC Test signals but only when they were being broadcast whereas Ekco had 24-hour use for the TV factory.
Editors Note: When TV production was transferred to Oulton Broad in 1966 this proved a great asset as there was no BBC Colour transmissions from the East Anglia transmitter because it had not been completed at that time.
Our next project was the development of the CE97. This was to be an updated CE39 with a better receiver and more transmitter power. It was still powered by a 12 volt car battery via one of those horrendous vibrators - if you didn't get it just right their contacts welded in a few minutes. Eric and I (why Eric? he was supposed to have something else on the go) got a bee in our bonnets about a dial-up system for the CE97 so that instead of calling all mobiles on the network, individuals could be called. We did this as a sort of unofficial project and used to stay till 2 or 3 in the morning working on this thing - it involved telephone dials and counting tubes. It worked OK but was never used because (a) it was too bulky and (b) nobody wanted it anyway.
We had a Sikh in the lab for a short while and we nearly had blood on the floor when Dick, inadvisably, said "Why don't you take off your turban and get your hair cut?"
Mike Foggarty and Bernard "Johnny" Walker worked on something or other for Eric Fielder.
At that time there were four canteens/dining rooms on the site (where the car showrooms are now). There was the Director's Dining Room, the Executive Dining Room, the Staff Canteen and the Factory Canteen. This latter could serve about 1000 I should think. If you intended to work overtime until after 6.30 senior staff (not paid overtime) could get a free supper in the executive dining room between 6.00 and 6.30. Some unscrupulous people went home at 6.30 or shortly after.
There were 3000 or 4000 people on the site at that time, mostly on television and radio production. At 5.30 they swarmed out of the gates onto a fleet of buses.
Towards the end of the CE97 development (it was to be manufactured at the Malmsbury factory) I thought I spied a lush green field elsewhere and left Ekco in about Feb.1956. When I got to this lush green field I discovered that it was artificial and tasteless. I stuck it for just over a year and returned to Ekco in July 1957. Everything had changed! Radar, under Phil Stride, had taken over the old D&E building and a new three-storey building had been built where the bicycle sheds had been. Communications had disappeared and the CE97 had sunk without trace (mainly because Pye had won the AM/FM war). Nucleonics had appeared from Malmsbury and occupied the new building with the Model Shop on the ground floor and the Drawing Office on the top floor. There were a lot of new faces but still a few familiar ones.
A.J. Brunker was director of the Electronics Division and Tony Martin was still Chief Engineer, but with a reducing role - he was nearing retirement - (A story goes that on an occasion he went to the hospital to have an X-ray and after he had been set up on the couch the x-ray machine wouldn't work; so he got up off the couch fixed the machine and then had his x-ray ). Norman Atkinson and TV development were still there but Peter Harvey now headed "Nucleonics" and under him were W.E. Thompson and Eric Fielder. Eric was developing a programmable guillotine for the printing industry; it was very troublesome machine and they gave up on it after a short while. "W.E". ran three nucleonics labs.; Bob Davis (no relation) Reactor, Jim Streeter Medical and I had Industrial. There was also an Applications Lab. run by Doug White with Alan Innes. E.B. Thompson was sales Manager with Laurie Taylor and Harold Finch Industrial and Medical sales respectively. A lot of changes - and a lot more to come!
Until about 1962 there was an annual Sports Day held sometime in the summer on the sports field. I think it was open to all except that the athletic events were restricted to Ekco employees and their families. There was a fun fair, complete with roundabouts, bumping cars and bingo, to attract the masses and an exhibition to advertise Ekco products, including radar and nucleonics equipment, in a marquee.
